In recent years, the importance of vagueness and uncertainty in the messages exchanged between agents has been highlighted mainly due to the ubiquitous nature of the (artificial or human) agents’ communication. The imprecision in the communication becomes more significant when the autonomy of the agents increases or the number of exchanged messages for a communicative goal is limited. In this p...

The naive approach to vagueness maintains that the nature of the vagueness of an expression basically consists in its not having boundaries between positive and negative cases of application in an appropriate ordering (a “soritical series”), whilst having both positive and negative cases in it. The naive approach is contrasted with the nowadays dominant approach to vagueness, maintaining that t...

Current Semantic Web technologies provide a logic-based framework for the development of advanced, adaptive applications based on ontologies. But the experience in using them has shown that, in some cases, it would be convenient to extend its logic support to handle vagueness and imprecision in some way. In this paper, the role of vagueness in the description of Web user interface characteristi...

Vagueness is the phenomenon that natural language predicates have borderline regions of applicability and that the boundaries of the borderline region are not determinable. A theory is presented which argues that vagueness is due to the fact that we are computationally bound by Church’s Thesis. Syntactic and semantic models motivated by the theory are introduced. Each disallows the use of class...

Research community has shown a great interest in OWL ontologies as a context modeling tool for semantic environments. OWL ontologies are characterized by its expressive power and are based on description logics. However, they have limitations when dealing with uncertainty and vagueness knowledge. To overcome these caveats, some approaches have been proposed. This work presents a novel approach ...

I want to address a foundational issue in the contemporary vagueness debate. This is very much dominated by three main approaches—semantic, epistemic and psychological— which, however distinct they may be in other respects, share a crucial common feature, namely that of characterizing vagueness in terms of the notion of borderlineness. These approaches “only” differ in their explication of bord...

In this paper we present a short survey of fuzzy and Semantic approaches to Knowledge Extraction. The goal of such approaches is to define flexible Knowledge Extraction Systems able to deal with the inherent vagueness and uncertainty of the Extraction process. In this survey we address if and how some approaches met their goal.

A number of arguments purport to show that vague properties determine sharp boundaries at higher orders. That is, although we may countenance vagueness concerning the location of boundaries for vague predicates, every predicate can instead be associated with precise knowable cut-off points deriving from precision in their higher order boundaries. I argue that this conclusion is indeed paradoxic...

The well known Aristotelian syllogistic system consists of 256 moods. We have found earlier that 136 moods are distinct in terms of equal truth ratios that range in τ=[0,1]. The truth ratio of a particular mood is calculated by relating the number of true and false syllogistic cases the mood matches. A mood with truth ratio is a fuzzy-syllogistic mood. The introduction of (n-1) fuzzy existentia...

The philosophical account of vagueness I call “transvaluationism” makes three fundamental claims. First, vagueness is logically incoherent in a certain way: it essentially involves mutually unsatisfiable requirements that govern vague language, vague thought-content, and putative vague objects and properties. Second, vagueness in language and thought (i.e., semantic vagueness) is a genuine phen...